Online marketing has become crucial to the success of businesses. Businesses failing to create an online, digital presence are suffering. One of the main reasons for their failure is being unable to answer the question — “Where should we begin from?”
Every business needs to begin somewhere, but they are just in need of guidance. They need someone to point them in the right direction so they can start to build their online presence. Businesses struggling to establish their digital presence can use this online marketing survival guide. Here’s what you need to know:
First Step: Marketing Your Business Online
You can run various marketing campaigns to spread the word about your business. You can run a pay-per-click and remarketing campaigns. Pay-per-click campaigns can provide you with instant results. However, you need to keep track of your pay-per-click campaigns to determine if they are working to attract customers or not.
Next, you have remarketing campaigns, which allow you to keep an eye on your visitors. Once they leave your website, you can still target them. If they did not buy something the first time around, chances are that they might buy something the second time you target them. You can run a pay-per-click and remarketing campaign alongside each other to increase your chances of creating a buzz, making a sale, and generating revenue.
Second Step: Optimizing Your Business
You need to optimize your business’s online presence via keyword research, titles and tags, and text and titles. You need to optimize your website by adding keywords throughout the website, including in the meta descriptions, meta title, and more.
For this to be successful, keyword research is essential. Without keyword research, your business will not rank on Google. If potential customers cannot find you online, you will lose revenue. By optimizing your website, you will have a higher chance of people in need of your services and products to find your website among the search results and click on it.
When researching keywords, remember, not to use industry jargon, as that will go over your customers’ head. Instead, stick to using simple and straightforward terms they can easily understand. Additionally, you can link key terms and elements on your website to other related pages within your website.
You can redirect your customers to a product or service you mentioned on the home page for instance by linking its name to the relevant page where they can view it in detail and order it. Apart from creating internal links, you can also create external links on other resourceful websites.
Information on that website should relate to your industry and products and services. The other website will create an external link, which will redirect their visitors to your website. For that, you will have to find relevant websites and build a relationship with them.
Third Step: Optimize for Mobile
Most users use their smartphone or handheld device to find businesses and learn more about them through their website. You need to have a mobile strategy in place for exactly this reason. You need to cater to all types of users, not just desktop users.
You need to invest in creating a responsive website design. A responsive website design allows your website to accommodate the window or screen size of a variety of different devices. If a new device comes out in the future with a completely difference screen size, your website will automatically adapt to it due to its responsive web design. Your customers will receive a seamless user experience regardless of the device they are using to visit your website.
Fourth Step: Geotargeting — Targeting Specific Geographic Areas
You can use Facebook to run targeted and hyperlocal mobile ads to attract your target customers. The service allows you to target customers based on their location. Since most people use their smartphone to visit Facebook, you can benefit greatly from running these types of ads on its social media platform. Potential customers who may not have found your website through Google or other online ads you launched, will find their way to your website through the ads you place on Facebook.
Fifth Step: Local Optimization
Even though local optimization may not be applicable for every type of business, it has gained momentum among businesses in the past few years due to the number of people who search for local businesses in their area.
If your target market are people in your locality, your business will benefit from using local optimization to target customers. Some strategies you can use for local optimization include on-page signals, third party signals, and reviews.
On-page signals use search algorithms such as implementing schema code and using geo-targeted keywords on your website. You will need to perform research to determine what local keywords you can use for local optimization.
Third party signals are how search engines like Google evaluate your local presence and authority. Yelp for instance is a third-party signal where customers who have used your services and products leave reviews about it on there for others to see, thus bringing us to our next point — reviews.
Reviews are essential, as that is how most people decide if they want to use your services or buy your products. Your aim is to receive positive reviews from previous customers. The more reviews your business receives, the higher you will rank on search engines.
You can always prompt your customers to leave a review once they have bought something from your website. If you also have a physical presence, you can ask your customers to leave a review on a popular review website.
If you want to succeed in the online rat race to rank higher and attract more customers to your website, you need to use this survival guide to ensure you cross the finish line and come in first place. If you do not what you are doing, you can always acquire the help of a company well-versed in optimizing websites and designing websites to rank on search engines.
by Bobby J Davidson
I love our companies and we love what we do. For more information on the Davidson Family of Companies, visit www.bobbydavidson.com/about. Sign up for my Newsletter at the bottom of this page.